The Other Battle Of Brooklyn

By LEONARD BENARDO and JENNIFER WEISS

Published: April 9, 2006

EVEN today, the event still resonates powerfully.

In 1934, workers took axes to a mural depicting earnest laborers, debauched socialites and rampaging policemen that the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera had painted on the interior wall of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center, facing the plaza.

The artist had aroused the fury of Nelson Rockefeller by adding a small but eminently recognizable image of the Russian revolutionary Lenin, and the resulting firestorm marked a signal moment in that era's pitched battle between art and politics.

Sixty years ago next month, only a dozen years after the smashed fragments of Rivera's creation were trundled out of Rockefeller Center in wheelbarrows, another episode of artistic purging took place, this time in Brooklyn. During May and June 1946, two 900-square-foot murals depicting three centuries of local history were unceremoniously removed from the cavernous two-story rotunda of Brooklyn Borough Hall less than a decade after their creation.

The murals, titled ''Brooklyn Past and Present,'' were the work of a relatively unknown artist named Alois Fabry Jr., who had been commissioned to produce them through the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Sprawling and detailed, interspersed with touches of whimsy and based on three months of prodigious research, they imbued the borough's central administrative office building with a sweeping monumentality.

But almost from the moment the murals were completed, they were criticized for both their content and style. And in an almost surreal parallel to the events across the river in Manhattan, Fabry, like Rivera, was accused of including a figure that bore a resemblance to Lenin.

No one knows where the murals are today, or even if they exist. The artist died in 1986, at age 74, and largely because the episode lacked players of the stature of Rockefeller and Rivera, it disappeared almost entirely from the public's consciousness. The story offers a tantalizing glimpse of a battle that in its modest way was almost as dramatic as the one fought a few years before, and involved many of the same flashpoints.

A Yale Grad in Shirt and Tie

A brief but curious reference to the murals can be found in a small text titled ''Brooklyn's City Hall,'' which was published to commemorate the restoration of the neo-Classical structure in the early 1980's. But no one who might be expected to be familiar with the episode had any memory of it.

Ron Schweiger, the borough historian, knew nothing of the murals; nor did the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, or his longtime predecessor, Howard Golden. The Brooklyn Historical Society could produce only a brochure published to commemorate the original dedication.

As it turns out, the richest and most complete material can be found in the memory and personal archives of the artist's son, Peter Fabry, a 59-year-old arts consultant. Sitting under a skylight in the family room of his SoHo loft recently, the tall and trim Mr. Fabry grew animated as he leafed through newspaper articles, drawings and other documents that helped flesh out the details of his father's story.

His father rarely spoke of the murals, he said. ''Perhaps out of resentment that they were taken down so indiscriminately,'' he said, ''or because he had developed artistically in a different direction, I learned very little about them during his life.''

The son, however, has cared for a trove of materials his father saved, including the original colored designs for the murals that were shown to the Art Commission, the city's design review agency, along with preparatory drawings, figure and detail studies, photographs of the mural, and newspaper articles describing and deploring the murals. Through these fragile documents, a remarkable story unfolds.

Alois Fabry, better known as Al, was a handsome man. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall and had an athletic build, thanks in part to membership on his high school track and swimming teams. And there was something slightly formal about him; unlike the bohemians of the day, he often painted in a shirt and tie.

A graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts who was only 25 when he received the commission to paint two of the largest murals ever assigned by the Federal Art Project, Fabry came from an artistic family. His father, a Czech immigrant, was a portrait painter who had studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, and his brother, Jaro, became a leading illustrator and cartoonist for national magazines.

Growing up near Fordham University in the Bronx, both boys were set upon an artistic path early on. The father sent his two sons to classes at the Art Students League and encouraged a friendly competition early on. When going out with his wife for the evening, the father often set up a still life for his sons to draw, then chose the better image when he got home.

The encouragement of a competitive spirit paid off when Alois Fabry won the New York City Architectural League medal for drawing at Evander Childs High School, followed by a scholarship to the Fieldston School in Riverdale. At Yale, he entered his first W.P.A. mural competition, which in turn led to a commission to create works for a post office in Ohio.